By David Martin – Acupuncture Physician practicing Holistic Medicine, serving Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Lehigh and Naples.
Common Breakfast Mistakes
The most common mistake people make with their breakfast is to eat typical breakfast foods, most of which are highly processed and loaded with sugars. This includes waffles, cereal, toast, muffins, bagels and other breakfast sandwiches. These are some of the absolute worst foods you can eat. They satiate your current hunger but set you up for metabolic disasters and fuel excess body fat and obesity-related diseases.
There are many thousands of well done peer reviewed studies that support the harmful effects of sugar on human health and many are listed on this site. For a quick review, read the “76 Dangers of Sugar to Your Health.”
A Few New Wrinkles
(including speeding up the aging and disease process?!)
What is the problem with Wheat??
First, let’s start by giving you a tiny bit of info about Celiac Disease, which was originally named “Coeliac disease” because it affects the small intestine. You may not know about this “disease”, but you actually may know someone who has it. Celiacs have an aversion to the protein called “gliadin” in wheat. One reaction they commonly experience to eating wheat is an instant response from the intestinal tract to explosively remove the offending food.. Get out of the way if they are headed to the bathroom. In serious cases, consuming wheat can put these people in the hospital or actually kill them.
What are Gliadin (Gluten) Affects?
Gluten literally comes from the word “glue”, and gluten has intensified over time thru plant splicing and now Genetic Engineering by the biotech folks. Gluten glues down the small finger-like villa in the small intestine which are there to absorb nutrients from your foods. Another facet of wheat breaks out of the gut barrier and invades the bloodstream, where it wreaks havoc in many ways…even going to the brain and breaking the blood barrier there. This causes an inflammation response. And, to add insult to injury, there is even an opiate component to wheat. You know, that “comfort food feel” we’ve all experienced when we’ve eaten it? It’s a chemical reaction. Your brain has just been given a drug.
Can you see how wheat has all the right “ingredients” to affect how the brain works, why we have trouble giving it up, and why the food industry keeps giving us more?
The percentage of confirmed Celiac cases is low in the population, less than 5%, but new understandings of gluten’s effects are leading many science and medical experts (and us) to believe that many “food allergies” are related to wheat consumption. Newer affected-population estimates I’m seeing in the research are moving up into higher double digits. We see it all the time here at the clinic. People get off wheat for a few days or weeks, and they get better. Amazing. Additionally amazing is that medical studies are now showing that the damage wreaked by gluten/gliadin in the liver is the same for Celiacs as for non-Celiacs. Get this…scientists are now beginning to understand that Celiacs are the ones with the Healthy Immune Response, not the other way around! It’s the rest of us whose immune systems may not be working properly.
Yes, Celiacs are probably having the Healthy Response to Wheat!!
White Paper on this topic: The Dark Side of Wheat
Speeding up the Aging & Disease Process
Anything which stresses and inflames the body is taking you down the path of cell mutation and destruction, e.g. Aging and Disease. Wheat and Sugar certainly do both. These are NOT health supporting foods, and Food is either our Best or Worst Medicine. I feel a new article Brewing in my Bones today….
BACK TO THE CEREAL KILLERS
Wheat and the Sugar in so many processed foods, especially in cereal, are also Genetically Modified to contain Roundup….yes, that poison you’ve probably sprayed in your yard hundreds of times. If you are eating processed foods, the likely-hood that you are consuming it is VERY high. And there may be other unpleasant Genetic Engineered surprises in your Cereal whose effects are, at best, dubious and at worst quite dangerous..
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
Well, for starters, Cancer, Alzheimers, Diabetes, Heart Disease, Premature Aging. Want more? Add the even higher cancer rates being discovered with the GMO’d varieties which are in most processed foods. I highly recommend this full-length documentary on The Secrets of Sugar by the CBC in Canada:
Dr. David’s Halloween Advice:
Beware of the Cereal Killers in our midst!!!
Read labels, support GMO Labeling and avoid wheat and all the commonly GMO’d ingredients–corn, canola oil, soy, and most sugar– in processed foods.
Note: There are a few natural sugars that I’m OK with in limited quantities, including these from organic sources: honey, agave, liquid cane juice crystals, and stevia .
Happy & Healthy Halloween,
David Martin & Staff at Lotus Blossom Clinic
Doctor of Oriental Medicine
(239) 277-1399